Coming Together to Combat Health Misinformation: An Academic and Public Libraries Partnership

Background: In the Fall of 2021, the (redacted) County Board of Supervisors declared COVID Misinformation a public health crisis and adopted a series of measures to actively combat it. A regional group of library directors agreed to work together to support the county efforts to provide reliable health information to the community. Each library sent a representative, which included health sciences librarians from the academic libraries, and adult services librarians who were already involved in health outreach from the public libraries. The group wanted to support the county goals by providing reliable information and building health literacy.

Description: The group’s first meeting was brainstorming ideas to support the County’s campaign measures. These ideas were synthesized into action areas and initiatives. The group then rated each initiative by potential impact and the ease of doing that item. The characteristics of ideal initiatives were projects that were collaborative, with a one year timeline, aligning with existing library services and sustainable with current personnel, and including some community outreach. The final priorities for the group are: build a guide of reliable health information sources, build reference skills of library personnel and a referral guide, develop a network of libraries, conduct instruction and events for the community. The regional directors had priorities to engage public officials, engage community advocates, invite experts to work with libraries, and find ways to train health workers on information literacy issues.

Conclusion: After developing the final priorities, the group met with the regional directors to request approval for the collaborative priorities. The timeline for the various initiatives was also approved, so the group will start building a resource guide and collaborating with the regional Network of the National Library of Medicine office for help with training. The group also met with regional public health administrators to align programs and discuss areas of collaboration. Further work and additional resources developed will be shared during the lightning talk.